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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write ...

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Many people use the word "supernatural" without realizing that is an illogical oxymoron.  We don't know all laws about our universe, so what does the term even supposed to mean?  If a phenomenon can't be explained by existing science, then it is existing science that is inadequate, not nature in refusing to accommodate the phenomenon.
 
For me, the classic example is the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
Thanks to the work of brilliant scientists over 300 years -- Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Gauss, Priestly, Faraday, Maxwell, others I've embarrassingly forgotten -- by the end of the 19'th century science seemed to be complete to many people.
 
Not that there weren't unsolved problems.  The heat capacity of polyatomic gasses for one; modeling stable atoms with existing physics; the photoelectric effect; and the quandary of the "ultraviolet catastrophe" in black body radiation.  Worse, try as they could, scientists there simply could not crack these nuts, could not make any progress, using the known (and complete) laws of physics.
 
Imagine that you lived at that time and are a believer in the supernatural.  Why then, there's your answer!  The problems couldn't be solved by natural science because they above and beyond science.  They're the work of God, or some supernatural deity or ... or who knew what, but they must be beyond our comprehension.  Forever.  Bow down and say amen.
 
Fortunately for all of us, any science worth his PhD intuitively understands my first paragraph.  They realized that if the "known" laws of nature couldn't, however much effort, solve some basic physical problems, then the laws were either in some kind error or there must be more laws than we had so far discovered.
 
I'm not going to take us through history of quantum mechanics and relativity.  This is a blog, not a book, after all.  I will say that so much of our technology -- the Internet, computers, other electronic devices, many medical devices, others I can't think of right now -- would not be in our lives.  We would be living pretty much as people live 100 years ago.
 
Supernatural.  The lethal superfallacy of so much of history.  Let's rid ourselves of it as swiftly as possible.

Natural science

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